Monique Hawkins has lived in UK for 24 years but was told to make preparations to leave as she submitted a copy of her passport rather than the original

A campaign group representing EU nationals living in the UK has urged ministers to reform Home Office permanent residency procedures after it emerged people were being told to prepare to leave because of minor paperwork issues.

Representatives of the3million said the case of Monique Hawkins, a Dutch woman who has lived in the UK for 24 years but received a Home Office letter advising her to make preparations to leave, showed the application process was too complex.

“We need reform of the system, this is a massive bureaucratic task,” said Nicolas Hatton, a French citizen and founder of the grassroots organisation campaigning for the rights of EU citizens.

German neuroscientist also told to leave UK after residency rejection

Read more

“This is just one example of the numbers of people who are getting rejection letters. This is happening every day. I think the point here is that we have got a system that does not work, it cannot deal with the registration of three million people. It is a massive bureaucratic task that even the government has got to realise has to be addressed.”

The more than three million EU nationals living in the UK are not required to register their presence in the country but many have rushed to apply for permanent residency as a way of guaranteeing their rights after Brexit. But growing numbers complain they are being erroneously rejected.

The immigration lawyer Jan Doerfel criticised what he called the “refusal mindset” at the Home Office. “Hawkins’s case highlights the tick-box exercise approach of the Home Office,” he said.

“There is definitely a refusal mindset whereby any ambiguity is resolved against the candidate. When they haven’t got a yes/no answer they move to reject.”

The Tory MP Dominic Raab, who intervened on Hawkins’s behalf, said he thought EU nationals who were settled in the UK before the referendum should be protected but that other EU countries had to agree to reciprocate.

“I have always made clear I believe we should protect the rights of existing EU nationals here at the time of the referendum, and it has been the EU that rebuffed the early UK efforts to provide reciprocal clarity on this,” said Raab, who supported leave.

The Home Office has issued statements since the referendum telling EU citizens that their status in the UK has not changed. But it has been inundated with permanent residency applications from EU nationals who fear their rights will be eroded post Brexit.

The number of outstanding applications went from 37,618 in June 2015 to almost 100,000 “currently in progress” in July 2016, including those seeking permanent residence cards and documents for non-EU family members of European citizens.

Earlier this week, the Guardian revealed that Hawkins had her application for permanent residency rejected because she included a solicitor-certified copy of her passport rather than the original, which she said she needed for travelling to the Netherlands to handle the paperwork generated by the death or her father.

“As you appear to have no alternative basis of stay in the United Kingdom you should now make arrangements to leave,” Hawkins’s rejection letter stated.

The Cambridge University graduate is married to a British man and they have two British children. She decided to apply for permanent residency after the referendum.

Hawkins said she never thought she would be deported but when she phoned the Home Office to discuss the decision communicated to her in October, four months after her application, she was told her case could not be discussed on the phone or by email. She described her treatment by the Home Office as being as absurd as a Monty Python sketch.

She has reapplied after obtaining a Dutch identity card, which allowed her to submit her passport.

A German national, Lars Graefe, who has been in the UK since 1988, received a similar letter. An aerospace executive, he travels every week and said he could not surrender his passport for the six-month period it can take the Home Office to process applications.

“Clearly the Home Office don’t know how to deal with EU citizens,” he said. “If you were in the private sector and treated customers like this you would be sacked.”

Doerfel called for a review of the Home Office procedures and a return to more practical practices. “What we need is for the Home Office to go back to the system in the 1970s, 80s and even the 1990s where case workers engaged with applicants and contacted them if issues arose, that would resolve things so much quicker than this idea of refusing and then appealing. It would be cheaper for the state, more humane and probably [result in] quicker resolution of immigration applications,” he said.